It said “Dice House.”
So John was not gambling.
With trembling fingers, she opened the second scroll. Exhaled the word— “Whorehouse” —on a relieved breath.
He was not lying in some brothel.
She knew what was upon the third paper, but she reached for it anyway.
“ ‘Cockpit,’ ” she read aloud.
She had already been to his favourite one that afternoon, a swanky establishment in Shoe Lane. Women often waited outside the doors of such places, demanding their men, and other men conspired to hide their own. Then a baronet’s son she knew a little from the theatre undertook to search for her at the cost of a kiss and a fondle. She let him, and he returned shortly: no John Chalker within and not seen there for many a day.
There was one other place to try. This one she’d have to enter herself.
